Acquainted with the Night Read Free

Berkeley, who said that nothing we see is really there. Of course Paul had thought it was pure nonsense, but maybe Berkeley was right. Maybe everything in the world was deceptive, his parents included.
    Richard and Nan generally did not go out on week nights since they got up so early every morning. They read side by side, or else his mother made phone calls to her friends while his father did paper work at the small desk in the living room. Occasionally people dropped over, therapists who talked about their cases. Paul would greet them—they liked to scrutinize him; he had something of a reputation for his violent tendencies, and he rather enjoyed their veiled curiosity. He might listen to them talk for a while, then go to his room. They did not stay late. But weekends were another matter entirely, devoted to pleasure. Nan and Richard would wake early as usual, and as soon as the few chores were done, take off in their shorts and running shoes along the Midway—weather permitting, as they said. In the winter it was swimming in the university pool. They seemed to have a passion for rhythmic movement which Paul did not share. When he was twelve he had rebelled, declaring that he no longer wished to accompany their leisure-time rounds like a pet—their five-mile runs, their serious movies on social themes, their bargain-hunting expeditions, their drawn-out dinners in foreign restaurants, their eternal Sunday afternoons at friends’ houses, drinking cocktails and eating through numberless bowls of salted nuts. His mother was hurt, but his father smoothed it over. “Typical of adolescence. He’s finding his own style. It’s natural that he should be bored with us. Let him alone.” “All right, Paul,” Nan said, in a voice straining not to sound resentful. “From now on you can make your own plans. You have your keys to come and go.”
    Of course they were happy, thought Paul, wiping the wetness from his face with his glove. It was unmistakable. Sometimes they seemed such a closed, snug unit that he felt like an intruder. They had spent years alone together before he was born, and he suspected that they had never grown used to the fact of his presence, or sensed quite what to do about it. One evening last fall he was studying in his room and didn’t come out to greet them when they returned from work. When he finally emerged at seven o’clock they were busy in the kitchen, earnestly reconsidering one of his mother’s drug addicts. “Why, Paul, my goodness, I forgot all about you,” his mother said, and rushed over to kiss his cheek. “You must be starving. Here, have some crackers while we finish getting dinner ready.”
    The only times he didn’t feel like an intruder, but like the very whirling axis of their lives, were the times he got into trouble and caused them trouble. When it was found in his freshman year at U High that he had been cutting classes for weeks, when it came out a year later that he was the mysterious decimator of the school library, with a cache of unstamped books on the floor of his closet, when it was discovered that he was the founder and guiding genius of the widespread and lucrative football pool the school principal had been trying in vain to stamp out, then their evenings turned into long tearful family confrontations. What Nan and Richard said during these sessions was confusing: at first they threatened to stop paying for his analysis if he didn’t give up his antisocial behavior. But at the end, at the reconciliation, they said he needed more intensive treatment, and that they would all go together to talk to Dr. Crewes. Those discussions caused him pain and anger and remorse, yet when they were over Paul felt a satisfactory sense of wholeness. He pulsed with energy and appetite; while his parents crept to bed weary and enervated, Paul would fix himself a triple-decker sandwich and a glass of milk, and eat voraciously. Then he rested, complacent in the knowledge that thoughts of